“It seemed so small a price.”
“It always does.”
Before the final decline of the Classic series in the mid-to-late 80s, fans generally named The Horns of Nimon as one of the three worst episodes ever (the other two being Underworld and The Gunfighters). It has its defenders as well (who tend to argue that fans who hate the episode just don’t understand what it was trying to do).
Back when these from-the-start posts were working through William Hartnell’s stories, I gave my opinion that The Gunfighters was better than its reputation, though certainly not among the better episodes of the series. My reaction to The Horns of Nimon is the same: it’s not nearly a worst-ever. Underworld stands (or rather sinks) all by itself. Nimon is pretty much par for the course in the overly-comical season 17. The monster itself is rather silly-looking and poorly realized, but the concept of it is memorable enough that the new series revisited the Nimons with the Matt Smith episode The God Complex. The sets manage to look okay despite the end-of-season budget crunch (far better than, for example, Gallifrey in The Invasion of Time a couple of seasons back). The overall silliness level is again too high, with pretty much all the actors playing their characters as comical pantomime buffoons, but that’s just the way they’re doing things in season 17. The writing is actually not bad here: if you try to just listen to the words, or were to read a script without having the episode on screen in front of you, it comes across as being much more balanced.
The story mines Greek mythology for its source, as Underworld did, but makes a far better job of it. In this case it’s the legend of the Minotaur. On the planet Skonnos (=Knossos), once the capital of a powerful, warlike empire that collapsed amid civil war, the alien Nimon (=Minotaur) has promised new technology to restore Skonnos to its galaxy-conquering heyday. All it asks in return are a series of human sacrifices, bringing with them a certain rare mineral. The aging Skonnos ships grab the sacrifices from the neighboring planet of Anneth (=Athens), once conquered by Skonnos and now too afraid to notice that things have changed. The sacrifices are thrown into the labyrinth, in the heart of which the Nimon waits to devour them.
In fact, it turns out the labyrinth is actually a giant printed circuit board, part of a machine the Nimon is building, and the Nimon’s promises to Skonnos are just a con game. What it’s building is an interstellar teleportation device, and once its finished millions of Nimons will invade Skonnos, consuming the life force of the planet until all life has been extinguished— and then they’ll find another world, greedy for power, that they can con into the same trap.
For an overall verdict, I’d say it’s right down the middle of season 17. That’s not a high standard to meet— season 17 overall has been the weakest since the series started— but it’s not a candidate for worst-ever story either.
Details
- The story was written by Anthony Read, script editor for Dr Who during Graham Williams’ first two years as producer. He cites as his inspiration looking at a printed circuit, and at an artist’s conception of the Minotaur’s labyrinth in mythology, and thinking they looked a lot alike. In interviews, he cites some disappointment that the set designers didn’t play up the printed circuit aspect, and he has a point. Though the sets look good enough as standard sci-fi corridors, there’s nothing to foreshadow or make you go “ah-ha!” when the Doctor finally deduces that the whole thing is a giant circuit board.
- Romana gets a very good outing in this story. Separated from the Doctor through most of the action, she’s allowed to step up and play the Doctor’s role in her part of the story, and she does it very well. Read comments that he’d been impatient with writers underusing the fact that Romana is a Time Lady and the Doctor’s equal (if not superior) in intellect, though not in experience. He wanted to correct that with this episode, and succeeded. It’s another reason to think that this could be a much more highly-regarded story if the actors had played it more seriously.
- This was the last episode of season 17 (though it wasn’t supposed to be), and the last episode with Graham Williams as producer and Douglas Adams as script editor. I don’t have any particular story that I can recall about why Williams moved on as producer, but Adams departure resulted from the fact that while season 17 was in production, fame finally landed on him and he simply didn’t have time for anything but managing the Hitch-hiker’s Empire any more. In assessing his impact on the show, and in particular the way the comedy was allowed to go too far in season 17, current Dr Who showrunner Steven Moffat makes the interesting comment that the very same qualities that made Douglas Adams a genius as a writer also made him a poor editor, unable to restrain himself from letting everything run out of control. What made this comment interesting to me (when I first saw it in a special feature on the City of Death DVD) is that, ironically, it is almost exactly the same explanation I have for the faults of Moffat’s tenure on new Dr Who.
- The incoming producer (who I’ll talk about next week) is going to come in wanting a clean sweep and new just-about-everything on Dr Who. So the end of season 17 with this episode also marks the last time we’ll hear Delia Derbyshire’s original arrangement of the theme song (used since the first episode in November 1963, with only a few extra trills added since then), the last time Dudley Simpson provides the background music for Dr Who (since the late 60s, as much a part of Dr Who’s sound as Murray Gold is today), the last use of the “space tunnel” animation and diamond logo in the opening credits, and the last appearance of the Fourth Doctor’s famous multicolored scarf (he’ll get a very different costume, and with it a different scarf, next season). Starting next week, everything’s new.
Shada
Nimon wasn’t supposed to be the last episode of season 17. Williams and Adams meant to end their run on the show with a big finale in the 6-part episode Shada, written by Douglas Adams. They’d saved up their money during the season to make it look good. The story featured a villain trying to revive a legendary renegade Time Lord imprisoned in the Time Lord prison, Shada, and the Doctor and Romana getting help from a retired Time Lord living on Earth as a Cambridge professor, whose on-campus quarters turn out to be his TARDIS in disguise.
The episode was in production, had completed all location filming in and around Cambridge (including an exciting bicycle chase scene with the Doctor and a lethal device controlled by the villain), and had shot the first of three planned studio taping sessions, when it all crashed to a halt. Despite the best efforts to come back to it, and the new producer’s attempts to work it into the production schedule of season 18, Shada was never finished and never broadcast.
What happened? Perhaps appropriately for a story about Time Lords, it was stopped by a clock. There was a BBC children’s show, more or less equivalent to Sesame Street in the US, that had an ornate toy clock used to teach young children how to tell time. Here was the problem: it was an electric clock. Why was that a problem? Because the BBC props department and the electricians department were represented by different unions, and they were in a dispute over who should actually plug in the clock. Eventually both unions went on strike and shut down the entire BBC.
Over who got to plug in a clock.
Over the years various attempts to present the story to fans were made. Douglas Adams never allowed his scripts for Dr Who to be novelized as part of the ongoing series published by Target books (to this day his stories, plus one Dalek story that fell foul of a dispute with the Terry Nation estate, remain the only Classic episodes left un-adapted in that series). Adams would later re-use the Professor Chronotis character, though no other plot elements from Shada, in his Dirk Gently novels. In the 90’s a VHS release came out that included all the completed footage from the episode, with Tom Baker providing bridging narration for the bits that didn’t exist; just recently that compilation came out on DVD. “Big Finish,” the company that produces an ongoing series of audio adventures (including those of the 8th Doctor), produced an audio version using the original scripts slightly edited to allow Paul McGann’s Doctor to be reunited with Romana (played again by Lalla Ward) and have the adventure. Finally, Douglas Adams estate recently allowed new series writer Gareth Roberts to publish a novelization which was generally praised.
But the episode itself will never be complete. If it had been finished, how would it have looked? From the footage that was shot, we can say: a lot like the rest of season 17. Some fans indeed suggest we may be better of that it wasn’t finished, for that reason. But my impression is it would probably join Adams’ other script for this season, City of Death as a bright spot in the otherwise mediocre season.
Either way, it’s too bad it couldn’t be completed, and the intended swansong of the Graham Williams era of the program never came to pass.
Next Week:
“The Leisure Hive,” 4 episodes, the season 18 premiere.
